Bio

I am an Associate Professor at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta (UoM). I have received the Ph.D. degree in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2006. Prior to joining the Institute of Digital Games, UoM, in 2012 I was an Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. I do research at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, computational creativity, affective computing, advanced game technology, and human-computer interaction. I pursue research concepts such as user experience modeling and procedural content generation for the design of personalized interactive systems for entertainment, education, training and health. I have published over 180 journal and conference papers in the aforementioned fields. My research has been supported by numerous national and European grants and has appeared in Science Magazine and New Scientist among other venues. I am currently an Associate Editor the IEEE Transactions on Games and was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing between 2009 and 2017. I have been the General Chair of key conferences in the area of game artificial intelligence (IEEE CIG 2010) and games research (FDG 2013). I am the co-author of the Artificial Intelligence and Games textbook.

Awards and Honours (Selected)

IEEE CIS Outstanding Paper Award, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games for the paper Crowdsourcing the Aesthetics of Platform Games.Most Influential Paper Award, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, for the paper Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation. The award was presented at the Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Conference, 2015.European Learning Game Award by the Games and Learning Alliance (GALA) Network of Excellence for the Village Voices Game (funded by the SIREN project), 2013.